The “Internet of Things” has received a great deal of attention for its promise—objects that operate and communicate with each other when they are nearby, all possibly without the need to ever plug them in or maintain batteries. Existing technologies, however, lack the ability to connect to the Internet in a sufficiently lower power manner to make this vision possible.
Conventional radio communication may consume orders of magnitude more power than may be desirable. Conventional Wi-Fi transceivers even may require much more power than is available from examples of energy harvesting technologies. Ambient backscatter technologies may enable device-to-device communication, but may create an isolated network disconnected from the Internet.